They replaced Kickoff with an interesting full screen ordeal with a
document time-line view called SimpleWelcome. Though many don't like the
shifting paradigm of including smart phone and tablet interfaces on a
desktop, I found its layout mostly comfortable on my tiny netbook. It is
very reminiscent of Gnome3.

They are working on something similar in plasma-active. I am planning
to try to get plasma-active included in playground and hopefully in
KDE:Extra once it is released later this year.

More info?

Regarding what? Plasma active has been blogged about a lot. You can
look at the KDE:Active OBS repo.

This was part of their new default Plasma panel called RocketBar. The
RocketBar is not terribly different from the upstream default, with the
exception of SimpleWelcome.

What, specifically, are the differences?

I think thats really all there is to it... RocketBar uses their special
widgets.

Then it is just a normal panel with a different set of widgets?

I personally did like that their Task Manager was
designed so as to only show the application icon, and not a description.
As I am fond of docks, I liked this. This is something that should be
integrated into the Task Manager as a option.

Upstream has already rejected this idea, they even rejected a working
patch to add this feature. We could always include the patch if we
wanted. It is very small and still works fine with KDE 4.7.

Thats very odd, what was their reason? I mean... if its a toggleable option,
wtf?